Stevenson’s The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde explores our good and evil natures,
but not in the way the cartoons taught me. Tweety Bird got huge and scary and
violent when his evil side came out, as did many others, but Stevenson’s Hyde
was smaller than Jekyll—wiry, malnourished, wild. Jekyll came to understand
that he had cultivated his good qualities, and thus his body was tall and strong;
his evil side was purely evil, and he had quelled his evil side, not fed it.
This is reflected in the Cherokee story about the
grandfather who tells the boy there are two wolves inside each of us—a good
wolf and a bad wolf. The boy asks which one is stronger, and his grandfather
replies “The one you feed.” Jekyll’s
wolfish Hyde is in danger of growing when Jekyll sets him free and exercises
him.
The popularity of Stevenson’s work in the 20th
century, from cartoons to films to Star
Trek episodes means this idea struck a chord with our imagination. In the Star Trek episode, entitled “The Enemy
Within” splits Captain Kirk in to his good and evil side, and complicates
matters by making his good side really problematic. He can’t make decisions or
lead effectively. The implication is that the “whole” Kirk has enough ego and
chutzpah to step on toes if he needs to get something done. Of course it’s the
original Star Trek, so the evil Kirk
is a pleasure-seeking hedonist, drinking and chasing women (more aggressively
than usual). Different context, but same
idea.
The other way we seem to split ourselves, and perhaps with
an even longer literary (and philosophical) history is the Cartesian dualist
division between the physical and the conscious, or the body and soul. This is
ancient, of course, but it hasn’t left us for all our technology. It came up
today in class, reading Calvino’s The
Nonexistent Knight. (Incidently, Calvino also explored the other dualism in
The Cloven Viscount, where the
titular hero gets blasted in to his good and bad sides by a cannonball, but
today we were talking about matter and spirit.)
The nonexistent Knight is an empty suit of armor that walks
and talks and rescues damsels, fueled, as he tells Charlemagne, by “will power…
and faith in our holy cause” (7), which Charlemagne concedes is enough to get
us all moving. This nonexistent knight is given a squire who is his opposite: a
man who seems to be “all body” in the sense that he doesn’t know he exists, so
he “becomes” everything he comes in contact with—ducks, pears, soup, and
Charlemagne himself.
This novella is a thought experiment: what if we could
separate our mind and body in to separate forms? What would a mind look like
with no body? Nothing. He needs the armor to give him shape. What would a
person be like with no core soul binding him to one identity? A person who
seems to carry traces of all races and who, having no core identity of his own,
borrows one from his immediate environment, which changes as he moves around.
He’s not a duck at dinner time, only when he’s walking by the duck pond and
dives in. He’s soup at dinner time, not knowing whether he should eat the soup,
or feed the soup to a tree with a hole in it, or become the soup itself. He
literally dives in to whatever surrounds him.
Why so many stories with binaries over the years? We have a
long history of thinking of ourselves as composite, frequently of two parts.
And is the real progress of the last century that we don’t anymore? That now we
tend to think of ourselves in multiple parts or roles? Today my students
discussed the idea of a Disco Ball theory of identity: we all have lots of
different facets, not just two constituent parts. That idea could take us far
afield from Jekyll and Hyde, more like boldly going where no one has gone
before.
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